Building in the Borderless Economy: Announcing Algorand’s Go SDK

As Algorand approaches MainNet launch, the team is excited to announce the release of the Go SDK, marking another milestone to further enable developers to easily build applications on top of Algorand. Algorand is maintaining a focus on designing and implementing interfaces that will empower users to participate in the borderless economy by continuing to deliver developer resources.

In addition to the documentation on godoc.com, the project’s readme has examples of how to execute common tasks using the SDK. The Go SDK can currently be used on Algorand’s TestNet, currently accessible through this application. TestNet will be more broadly open shortly. Users are encouraged to check out the github repository and share feedback.

The availability of the Go SDK comes comes on the heels of the release of the Algorand Developer website earlier this month. Algorand also currently provides REST APIs that enable straightforward interaction with the core services of an Algorand node: agreement and key management. Open API documentation is provided for these APIs that makes it straightforward to consume them directly. There is further work being done on a number of client libraries that additionally provide a broad set of task-oriented functionality (transaction signing, address generation, etc.) to support other common use cases.

To stay informed on upcoming launches of official clients for other languages, TestNet and MainNet news, please connect with us here.

SDK Quick Start

To download the SDK, open a terminal and use the `go get` command.

go get -u github.com/algorand/go-algorand-sdk/...

The API clients are intended to be used with running instances of algod and kmd. These processes are described on developer.algorand.org. To connect to one of these processes, you must first know its API token and which port it is running on. Each of the the two processes has a .token and .net file located in its respective data directory with this information.

To check the status of your node using algod, check out the following example:

We will be publishing more SDKs and examples in the near future. We look forward to hearing from you at community.algorand.org. If you want access to TestNet, please apply!